promote a good book whoever printed it. Mr. Campbell,
the third book-dealer, was "very industrious, dresses All-a-mode and I
am told a young lady of Great Fortune is fallen in love with him." Of
Mr. Usher, the remaining book-trader, Dunton asserts:

"He makes the best figure in Boston. He is very rich, adventures
much to sea, but has got his Estate by Book selling."

Usher was a book-maker, undertaker, and adventurer, doubtfully
attractive or desirable appellations nowadays; but what higher praise
could have been given in colonial tongue? He would have angrily resented
being dubbed a publisher; that name was assigned to and monopolized by
the town-crier. Usher died worth L20,000, a tidy sum for those days.

Happy, indeed, were all the Boston book-sellers; blessed of the gods!
rich, witty, modish, beloved, beautiful! The colony was sixty years old,
opulent, prosperous, and fashionable; but a book-seller cut the best
figure. Surely the book trade had in Boston a glorious ushering in, a
golden promise which has not yet deserted it.

Book-printing, too, was a highly honored calling. The first machine for
the craft and mystery of printing was set up at Cambridge in 1639, and
for twenty-three years the president of Harvard College was responsible
for its performances. Then official licensers were appointed to control
its productions, and not till a decade of years before the Declaration
of Independence were legal restraints removed from the colonial press.

The first printer in the colony, Steeven Daye, was about as bad a
printer as ever lived, as his work in the Bay Psalm-Book proves; and he
spent a term in Cambridge jail, and was altogether rather trying in his
relations with the godly ministers who were associated with him in his
printery. The second printer had to sleep in a cask after he landed, but
he died with a fortune, a true forerunner of the self-made men of
America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was
"brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the
affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who
tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making--the printing
and binding--were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a
worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by
another, and rich, too, in spite of the thirty Green olive-branches; and
Judge Sewall, also, as Cotton Mather said, "edified and beautified with